Is climate change really a human rights matter?

The media and the middle class may love net zero. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that voters are less keen. Predictably then, activists have been trying to take as much power as possible away from elected representatives, transferring it instead to international courts and judges. This morning, this programme of lawfare scored a major success in the European Court of Human Rights.

Every yard gained by a well-meaning extension of the ECHR is a yard lost to the democratic process

Some months ago, three high-profile cases reached the Court where the claimants suggested that climate change was a European human rights matter. A concerned Frenchman, a number of Swiss activists and an active Swiss female pensioners’ environmentalist organisation, the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, argued that in failing to take adequate steps to halt climate change, France and Switzerland had violated their right to private and family life – and their right to life itself. Even more ambitiously, a group of youth activists from Portugal sought similar relief against not only Portugal but all the other states in Europe, including the UK, by arguing that they were likely to be affected by cross-border climatic effects.